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Afghan Arrested in New York Said to Be a Heroin Kingpin

An Afghan tribal leader designated by the Bush administration as one of the world's most-wanted narcotics dealers was arrested over the weekend in New York, federal authorities announced Monday.

The leader, Hajji Bashir Noorzai, is accused of building a multimillion-dollar heroin trade through an "unholy alliance" with the Taliban, the former fundamentalist Islamic government in Afghanistan, according to an indictment unsealed Monday, in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

He is charged with importing more than $50 million in heroin from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the United States and other countries. In 2004 the administration added him to its roster of international narcotics kingpins. At a news conference on Monday John P. Gilbride, the special agent in charge in New York for the Drug Enforcement Administration, called Mr. Noorzai the "Pablo Escobar of heroin trafficking in Asia," comparing him to the Colombian cocaine lord, who died in 1993.

The indictment charges that Mr. Noorzai, 44, forged a partnership in the 1990's with Mullah Muhammad Omar, the longtime leader of the Taliban. At one point in 1997, when the Taliban governed Afghanistan, its authorities seized a truckload of morphine base from Mr. Noorzai, the indictment says. Not long after, the Taliban returned the shipment with "personal apologies" from Mullah Omar, it says.

That episode helped to cement a relationship in which Mr. Noorzai provided explosives, weapons and militia forces to the Taliban in exchange for protection for his poppy fields, opium laboratories and transportation routes, said David N. Kelley, the United States attorney in Manhattan. He said Mr. Noorzai's business was reduced, but not crippled, after the Taliban was ousted by United States-led forces in December 2001.

Federal agents said Mr. Noorzai's arrest was part of a newly aggressive pursuit of narcotics dealers in Afghanistan, where a booming heroin trade that yielded as much as $2 billion in profits last year is corroding the struggling democracy led by President Hamid Karzai.

The authorities declined to provide details about where and how Mr. Noorzai was arrested. At a hearing on Monday afternoon before a federal magistrate judge, the federal prosecutor in charge of the case, Boyd Johnson, said the arrest was made at about 12:30 p.m. on Saturday in New York by D.E.A. agents.

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Mr. Kelley said only that the D.E.A. "became aware of the fact that Noorzai was planning to travel to this country." It remained unclear why Mr. Noorzai would risk traveling to New York.

At the hearing, Mr. Noorzai showed little sign of being the wealthy and fearsome warlord who, American drug agents say, controls most of the poppy fields in southern Afghanistan. Appearing in a blue polo shirt and looking slightly dazed, Mr. Noorzai spoke only to acknowledge that he understood the judge's statements as they were translated into Pashto by a court interpreter.

Magistrate Judge Douglas F. Eaton appointed a lawyer to represent Mr. Noorzai free of charge, after the lawyer, David Greenfield, said Mr. Noorzai was "new to the country" and had no assets here. A bail hearing was set for Wednesday. If convicted, Mr. Noorzai faces a mandatory minimum 10-year prison sentence and a maximum of life. The government is seeking to recover $50 million in illegal narcotics gains.

The indictment describes two episodes when Mr. Noorzai's organization succeeded in importing heroin into the United States: one in 1997, when he sent 57 kilograms to New York, and another in 2000 when he imported 500 kilograms "to the United States and Europe."

United States counternarcotics agents in Afghanistan have said Mr. Noorzai was providing heroin proceeds to finance the operations of Osama bin Laden. Mark Steven Kirk, a Republican congressman from Illinois who has made two fact-finding trips to Afghanistan, said Mr. Noorzai had borrowed operatives of Al Qaeda to transport heroin out of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where American drug agents say he maintains laboratories to process opium.

Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Afghanistan for this article.